Beige Box Blues

With the arrival of a new generation of consoles, rumours are once
again spreading of the imminent demise of the PC. But while
shortsighted pundits will once again be amazed to discover in a few
years time that the PC is still going strong, it has to be said
that the beige box's continued survival as a gaming platform is
frankly amazing given the sheer quantity of utter dross that
arrives on our doormats every month.

Bugger

Onimusha - I hate the control system and awkward camera angles and the game itself is hardly groundbreaking, but the production quality and sheer level of polish is streets ahead of anything you will ever find on the PC. Why?!?

Having recently acquired a PlayStation 2, the shoddy production
values of most PC games have been brought into sharp focus. And
while we continue to put up with second rate bug-ridden tripe,
console users have never had it better.
Of course, console developers have the advantage of working with a
closed box with fixed hardware and a captive audience of millions.
PC developers on the other hand have to contend with half a dozen
operating systems, several generations of graphics card and a
bewildering array of drivers, soundcards and peripherals, all of
which can reduce their beautifully written code to a nightmare of
blue screens and illegal operation errors. It's a nice excuse, but
it doesn't cover the kind of glaringly obvious bugs and fundamental
gameplay issues which frequently slip through playtesting
apparently undetected.
In the last few weeks alone we have seen bugs that cause specific
missions to crash, clipping problems that allow you to walk through
solid objects, and AI flaws that cause your men to walk into
burning buildings, wander off into an enemy base by themselves, or
get stuck trying to navigate their way around a tree. None of these
problems are hardware related - they are simple bugs and design
issues which everyone who plays the game will see at some point,
and which should have been picked up by any halfway competent QA
department. Even hardware issues can be pretty blatant. One game
which shall remain nameless crashes to the desktop at random
intervals when run on a computer which is "too fast". If by any
chance the programmer responsible is reading this, go to the back
of the class - you know who you are.

Lazy

Codename Outbreak - a great PC game let down by clipping problems, AI issues and some of the most gawdawful voice acting we've ever come across. Doesn't anybody test this crap before kicking it out the door?

Most PC developers seem to have slipped into the "release now,
patch later" mentality, a luxury for the lazy not available to
console developers. If you don't get it right first time in a
console game it can mean an expensive recall, but you can
comfortably foist off any old rubbish on PC owners and then patch
it afterwards if the sales justify it.
The developer of a recently released PC racing game admitted to me
that their multiplayer support was lacklustre because they ran out
of time, and that "a patch might fix us up if there is demand for
it". While this is perhaps not unreasonable given that multiplayer
is a fairly minor aspect of the game in question, all too often
this same attitude is extended to cover fundamental features and
show-stopping bugs. The result is games like Tribes 2, Anarchy
Online and Black & White, all of which required patches to
solve pretty basic bugs and design flaws. Amusingly, two of them
even required patches to fix their patching utility. This is hardly
rocket science, folks.
It's not just the bugs that drag down PC games either. Fire up
pretty much any half decent PlayStation 2 game and you will be
greeted by a gorgeous widesceen DVD-encoded cinematic. Meanwhile on
the PC we are still squinting at low resolution AVIs marred by
horrendous voice "acting" and riddled with compression artifacts,
despite the fact that almost every new PC shipped in the last two
years has come with a DVD-Rom drive as standard. Developers and
publishers just don't seem to put as much effort into their PC
titles. That's not to say that consoles don't have their fair share
of bad games, it's just that mediocre console games tend to be
better produced and more slickly presented than mediocre PC games.

Conclusion

It seems that we are the ugly red-haired stepchildren of the gaming
industry, ignored and beaten by the publishers and developers who
foist off their left-overs on those of us still trying to play
games on the big beige box. While we can forgive hardware issues
and driver clashes beyond their control, the frankly poor
production values and sloppy beta testing evident in many PC games
can and should be improved.
Bug-free games might be a utopian ideal beyond the reach of mortal
men, but is it unreasonable to expect our games to at least look
like somebody has put some effort into them?